In Love and War

by Alex Preston

  8. A-Side: Esmond Lowndes: Milton in Italy, 1638–39 (30′ 21″)

  B-Side: ‘Hell. Bugger, as Gerald would say. I’d meant to record these things more often, but so much has been happening, and every night Bailey and I sit up planning and plotting, trying to sort our way through the mess that’s unfolding across Florence and Europe. So what has happened in the six weeks since my last direct-to-disc? I’ll start with the pathetically personal and broaden to the faintly historic. You’ll want to know, whoever-you-are, what is going on between me and the admirable-stroke-terrifying Ada Liuzzi.

  I join you in your curiosity and only wish I could help. She came in the next day, the day after our kiss on the bridge, and every broadcasting day since, maintaining an air of chilly professionalism, resisting offers of after-work drinks and dinners and dances at the Maggio Musicale and, indeed, that far-off look has barely left her face. Only once, when we ran into each other on the via Porta Rossa, I coming back from dinner with Friedrich Kriegbaum, she from a concert in the Cascine, did I sense a crack in the froideur. A heavy rain squall came down over the city, as if the Arno were flowing upwards. Everyone was hurrying with their jackets tented over their heads, and I ran straight into Ada. Her eyes lit up for a moment when she saw me, and I could tell she was a little drunk, very wet. I took her hands and she didn’t snatch them away immediately. I kissed her cheek but close enough to the corner of her mouth that she could have turned it into something more had she wanted to. She almost did. I’m stricken, really. It is pathetic, to have fallen for someone like this, and to betray myself in so many trite, adolescent ways. I try to manoeuvre opportunities for us to work together, just the two of us; I’ve been waking from elaborate rescue dreams in the small hours, whisking her out of Europe on the back of a white charger.

  I call her when I’m drunk, but she never answers.

  My mother’s a gaolbird! Mosley was arrested first, then most of the rest of the active British Union. There was even talk of father doing clink, but sense seems to have prevailed there. At least mother’s back in Britain. Seems the realities of war broke up the hiking party in Berchtesgaden. It was decided that the squawking posse of English matrons surrounding the Führer were an unnecessary distraction. Hess drove mother and Diana Mosley to the aerodrome himself. They were picked up as soon as they set foot on British soil. They’re in Holloway Prison with Mosley, all three of them in a cosy little cabin of their own. Extraordinary that five years ago there was talk of these people running the country.

  Mussolini, the hunter in the field, has finally pulled the trigger. Italy is at war with Britain and France. What does this mean? A final exodus of Brits from Florence. A host of women called Gladys have left, although my favourite of them, the indomitable Gladys Hutton, has said she’ll stay no matter what. Bailey and I have been frantic, sorting passports for ancient coves living in isolated splendour above Monte Oliveto, persuading Gladyses they can’t take their entire wardrobes with them on the train, then hauling suitcases around the station like porters, ordered about by women in pince-nez who colonise their railway carriages like their uncles colonised Poonah.

  Goad has moved into the church apartments, a room on the ground floor. He’s not well – I suppose you’d call it nerves. He’s convinced that, if he’d had more support from his superiors, if he’d been allowed to continue at the Institute for a little longer, he’d have been able to prevent Musso from getting into the war. He writes thick letters to Lloyd George and Churchill and Duff Cooper, but you can’t think they’ll ever be opened, let alone read. He comes up and joins us some evenings, sits ghostly at the table worrying his food while we plan the latest evacuation. He’s been hearing noises in the night, too. A baby crying, rustling footsteps, coughing. He thinks it’s part of his illness. Perhaps it is.

  As for the Italians declaring war, that’s simple – pure opportunism. Mussolini saw which way the tide was turning and jumped. They’ll be eating strudel and raising steins on Piccadilly before the end of the year, unless the Americans help us out. Finland, Belgium, Norway have fallen; France has all but gone – there are Germans on the Champs-Elysées, the Brits ferried back from Calais in fishing sloops. If it’s all over this year, or early in ’41, the Italians will need to show they deserve a seat at the table alongside the Russians and the Germans. That’s why they’re fighting.

  Pavolini called me up last night. With Goad ill, I’ve been making the broadcasts myself. Apart from the prescribed guff, I’ve been trying to stay away from matters political, rehashing my notes from F. R. Leavis’s lectures, speaking about Shelley and Yeats. Pavolini was awfully pally, described me as a key asset. But he pointed out that the raison d’être for Radio Firenze was now something of a nonsense. Rapprochement between the Brits and the Italians being, for the moment, off the table. He’s given me a plan for the next six weeks of programming. Italian poets, German composers, even more propaganda. Two days devoted to Balbo, the great Italian air hero shot down by his own troops in one of these absurdly antiquated Fiat biplanes that make up the Italian air force.

  I imagine I’ll eventually find myself heading back to a Britain changed beyond recognition with – who knows – Mosley as Commander of the British Reich or some such. In the meantime, I’ll keep my head down and concentrate on those few small things I can do to help push back that frightful prospect. Good night, whoever-you-are.’

  9. A-Side: Esmond Lowndes and Friedrich Kriegbaum discuss Bach’s Goldberg Variations (33′ 33″)

  B-Side: The Battle of France is over; I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. That was my Churchill voice. He’s bloody good, actually. Much better than Chamberlain, hoisted by the petard of history. Churchill’s a bit more like it – feels as if he’s up for a fight. I’m no good at accents, really. Just listen to my Italian. I know the words all right, but can’t get myself to sound like a local. It’s partly why I’ve become something of a recluse, hiding from the Blackshirt gangs who’ve grown in number and aggression since war was declared. Mostly bitter older men, veterans from the last war looking for a reason to pull on a uniform and biff people up. Sound familiar?

  Some good news, finally. I mean not only that, so far, the British pilots have managed to fight off the Hun. And wasn’t this how we always dreamed the wars of the future would be fought, high up in the clouds, sharks of the air ripping chunks off each other? But even better, Goad discovered that Carità has left Florence, joined up and gone to fight in Albania. The town can breathe.

  Also, Ada loves me. I waited until we’d worked late recording a show on The Decameron. We were still in the studio at nine in the evening. I kept slipping up on the passages in Italian, clanking mistakes in my translation, partly because it was reminding me of first being in Florence and reading the book in the loggia of the Palazzo Arcimboldi with Fiamma. Finally we were done and Ada pulled her scarf around her head, started buttoning her jacket. I asked her to join me for a drink and was surprised when she said yes. I found a three-quarters-full bottle of Chianti in the kitchen and led her up to the roof of the church.

  We’ve been so busy, too busy even to come up and admire the sunsets, and the rooftop has grown over. Weeds spew out between tiles, the little garden where they must once have planted raspberries or tomatoes is now dense with wild fennel, yellow flowers shooting up through chicken-wire. We sat on the roof and drank our wine, and Ada said something about how Florence reflects her hills, how the undulations of the rooftops mirror the rise and fall of the land. It struck me as beautiful and true, and I thought back, again, to sitting on another rooftop with Fiamma and seeing the purple darkness reaching up to cold heights. I told Ada all about Fiamma, or almost all. She listened very carefully and was quiet afterwards. I leant over and kissed her, and she didn’t resist, though nor was she anything more than politely encouraging. We spoke for a while longer and then she invited me for dinner the next evening.

  I’d imagined a lonely existence for Ada away from the studio. Whenever I te
lephoned her, after drinking too much and feeling maudlin, I pictured her with some serious book in her lap, reaching out a hand to the telephone and then drawing it back. In fact, her house is something of a salon. It wasn’t just me for dinner. I’d made an enormous effort with my clothes, I bathed and perfumed and pomaded. I’d selected a copy of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by Yeats, to give to her. It was a present from Anna, Christmas before last, and it felt like a good sacrifice, to make it Ada’s.

  I arrived at the via dei Forbici. I could hear conversation echoing in the stairwell as I made my way up. The door to the Liuzzi apartment was open and there were six or seven young people with Ada in the kitchen, more grouped around an older man with thick spectacles and thinning hair who sat on the divan in the drawing room. I’d brought a bouquet of flowers – lilies from the stall in front of the Villa Ventaglio. I stood, holding them stupidly, until Ada swept out of the kitchen and kissed me and took the flowers and cooed over the book, and seemed friendlier and more relaxed than she’d ever been with me before. It wasn’t the tête-à-tête I’d been hoping for, but, rather despite myself, I had a smashing time. The party was to celebrate the release of one of Ada’s friends – a thin-faced, quiet, good-looking man called Bruno Fanciullacci – from gaol. I saw Ada’s eyes slide to him repeatedly, monitoring his position in the room. He carried a matchstick in the corner of his mouth which bobbed gently as he spoke. He was the son of one of the leaders of the local Communist Party and had been arrested on a series of trumped-up charges, given seven years and released after two.

  The older man was Piero Calamadrei, a Professor of Law at the university who’d led the legal challenge to Bruno’s imprisonment. Whenever he spoke, the rest of the room fell quiet, although his words came in jagged, impressionistic bursts that were hard to follow. We sat on the floor with our bowls in our laps – Ada had made lasagne – and the young people talked as they ate, shouting across each other and filling beakers with wine from unlabelled bottles, looking up reverently at the Professor whenever he held forth on politics, or literature, or law. Ada made sure that I was included in conversations, translated words she thought might be difficult for me, trailed her fingers through my hair as she passed. She introduced me to her friends with a kind of protective warmth I found very touching. It made me realise how, after three and a half years in Florence, I know very few Italians. Shameful, really. This was a strange bunch, though.

  The Professor seemed to take against me at first, referring to me as Ada’s “pet Fascist” and saying, with a little wrinkle of his nose, that he’d listened to my programme on d’Annunzio. No praise, or comment, just the nose.

  In one corner sat a famous cyclist, Gino Bartali, who was a friend of Ada’s father and was cheerfully and palpably in love with his new wife, Adrianna. They spoke only to each other, smiling around the room every so often as if allowing us collusion in their bliss. A group of serious young men surrounded Bruno, huddled on one side of the room, watching him move the matchstick around his mouth. They all looked rather tired and ill-fed and trim-moustached. Three young women in Agnes Ayers turbans, smoking Sobranies, stood in the doorway, looking over at the men and letting out little flustered laughs. Finally, sitting with Ada and me, a lady called Maria Luigia Guaita, a plump, friendly sort from the Monte dei Paschi bank where my account is held. I hadn’t quite worked out at this point what should perhaps have been rather obvious – that this rag-tag bunch at Ada’s house were the Florentine chapter of Giustizia e Libertà, that the Professor was their leader, that Ada was testing me somehow by bringing me along.

  After dinner, with the French doors open to the square below, the Professor began to talk about books. I lost a little of the subtlety, even with Ada whispering occasional translations in my ear, but he was speaking about the role of literature in politics, the temptation for writers to retreat into symbol and allegory, rather than recording the stony facts of the world. He said it was the writer’s duty to speak for those who couldn’t speak, who were trapped or overlooked or oppressed. He said, in times like these, novels should be written with broken fingers, and all poets’ eyes should be black. He fixed me then and asked me if I wrote at all, and everyone was silent.

  I didn’t see what else I could do; I told him about In Love and War, about Hulme and how writing about him was a way of writing about my father. Their friendship, I thought, had driven my father to Fascism. That staying true to Fascism, Mosley and violence, was all a fidelity to his dead friend. I’d always felt, I told them, that I was out of place, and that my attempt to make Hulme a hero was an attempt to forge someone from my father’s world, someone with fierce, Fascist ideas, into a laudable figure. I could show Hulme, a copy of Sorel from the London Library in one hand, a gun in the other, living the philosophy he preached: heroism, duty, standing up for those values that made life worth living. But I’d buggered it up. The novel didn’t work. I was writing it with an ugly hand over my eyes. By the end I was exhausted. You must remember I did all of this in Italian, which gave it a kind of clumsy honesty.

  Ada raised her glass to me. The Professor swallowed the contents of his own, seemed satisfied, and began to ask me questions about Auden and Spender. He thought Pound a great poet, he said with a sorry smile. Yeats, too. Now that my ladder’s gone, he quoted in English, I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Bloody good. Then everyone began to talk and argue, and a group of university students turned up, and with them a young, pretty girl with white-blonde sparkle, Tosca. Everyone calls her La Toschina. Her boyfriend, a tough-looking fellow named Antonio Ignesti, seemed to take a shine to me – heavy Sicilian accent he had, barely caught a word. He kept urging me to drink from his bottle of grappa and soon it was two in the morning and people were walking out into the night. Finally I was left with Ada on the balcony, looking over the darkened square.

  That was last night. No great passion. We kissed, slept in the same bed, but not much more than that. We talked a great deal. She’s part of the Resistance, which strikes me as frightfully brave. It’s why she stayed in Florence when her parents left, to keep up her work here. Radio Firenze provides her with just enough of a cover story. I was stroking her hair as she told me this, her head in my lap. She’s involved in counterfeiting documents. She and the plump cashier, Maria Luigia, create the passports at night with the bank’s franking machine, official paper stolen by someone at the Ministry in Rome. Then Gino Bartali, with the alibi of his gruelling training, cycles out to safe houses. Hiding there are deserters from the Italian Army, Communists threatened with internment, Jews looking to forge authentic Italian identities for themselves before Il Duce carries out his threat to round them all up and deliver them to Hitler.

  Just before I left, a few hours ago, as the first light broke over the city, she spoke to me in her glowing voice. She said this was why she’d been hesitant about us, why she’d backed off instead of doing what everything in her heart told her to do – to take me in her arms and kiss me. Because I was the enemy. And she needed to know that I was with her, that the decency she sensed in me wasn’t just a fabrication of love. I felt like Desdemona, you know: She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them. Ada’s bravery undoes me a little.

  It’s coming up for six. I need a few hours’ sleep. Rustling, movement, happy familial sounds from the empty rooms tonight. Not uncanny now – comforting. Good night.’

  10. A-Side: Gerhard Wolf and Alessandro Pavolini discuss opera from Wagner to Puccini (33′ 54″)

  B-Side: ‘The picture we receive of the war, through Radio Londra, through the Empire Service, through the distorted lens of La Nazione, is muddled.

  It is easy to think that propaganda only works in one direction, but, as Dr Johnson said, among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth. We have no idea how things stand; all we can do is number the facts, the certainties, the casualties. Italy is at war with
Greece, using Albania as a springboard into the Peloponnese. Germany and Britain continue to hack each other out of the skies above the Channel; those antediluvian Italian Fiats have joined the Messerschmitts in taking on the Hurricanes and Spitfires. Bombs rain down on the cities in squalls, exploding across Bristol, across Bonn, in strange symmetries which suggest fore-planning, complicity, consent. Liverpool’s getting it bad just at the moment. It was Hamburg last month. Under the dark waters of the Atlantic, the U-Boats prowl.

  Ada and I spend several nights each week at the via dei Forbici. It feels provisional, unlikely: sometimes I catch sight of us in a shop window, or in the bathroom mirror at her apartment, and I think how odd we look as a couple. She’s twenty-six, three years older, but there’s something about her, perhaps also about me, that makes that distance seem much greater. She still gets the look occasionally, staring off as if I’m not there. It makes me feel as if any attempt to know her is doomed, but then she’ll smile, and never has a face changed so instantly, and she’ll place those sparrow-bone wrists around me and pull me in, and I have sudden, primordial charges. We’re happy together, or I am.

  If it strikes you as strange, after Philip, after Gerald, that I should love Ada, it shouldn’t. It is not only that Fiamma, dear dead Fiamma, served as a copula, a springboard, a bridge. I have always loved beauty and the gender of those I love matters to me as little as their shoe size. It seems odd to me that so many humans limit themselves, slavishly. For now, it is Ada.

  I realised that, since my last recording, since I spoke about Ada and her Resistance pals, I needed to be more careful with these discs. It didn’t strike me until a few days afterwards, walking through the Boboli Gardens on my way up to the Kaffeehaus to meet Ada. Unprompted by any sight or sound, I was gripped by a sudden certainty that someone was listening to the recordings I’d made. I raced back through the Oltrarno, scattering morning shoppers and their baskets, clattered upstairs and found the studio empty, naturally, the discs as I’d left them. But now I’ve eased up a floorboard, hidden them beneath it, scattered rugs.